


Please Get Off Riza Hawkeye's Front Walk or So Help Her God

by willowcrowned



Series: Lose All Your Senses [5]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Dwarf in the Flask, Everybody Lives, Gen, No beta we die like mne, Riza: im going to make soup about it, Riza: my fucking twink idiot of a best friend is a fucking twink idiot and his bf is Worse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-04
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:15:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27872150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowcrowned/pseuds/willowcrowned
Summary: 'As a rule, she is perfectly fine with chaos running rampant through the streets so long as it’s well aware that the second it sets foot onto her front walk it will be filled with enough bullets to stock a small armory. Elric’s failing is that he doesn’t seem to be entirely aware that she always has at least two firearms on her, nor that her front walk is off-limits for him. He barely even seems aware that he brings chaos wherever he goes. Which, Riza reflects, is exactly why Roy likes him. 'Riza Hawkeye would like it very much if Roy Mustang would stop dating the human incarnation of barely-restrained chaos. She'd also like it if he stopped being an idiot in general, but, well, you can't have everything.
Relationships: Edward Elric & Riza Hawkeye, Edward Elric/Roy Mustang
Series: Lose All Your Senses [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1880170
Comments: 28
Kudos: 287





	Please Get Off Riza Hawkeye's Front Walk or So Help Her God

**Author's Note:**

> The semester is over, I've officially recovered by playing a ton of minecraft, and I am absolutely _delighted_ to be back and writing this AU again.

Riza likes to do her shopping on Saturday afternoons. Saturday mornings are for telling off whatever hapless low-ranking officer has attempted to rope her into overtime by the order of some even more hapless slightly-higher-ranking official, Sunday mornings are for drinking rather too much wine and reading deeply violent and completely unrealistic murder mysteries while subbing in the names of whomever she had to tell off the day before, and Sunday afternoons are for taking Hayate to the dog park with a picnic lunch. 

Riza has taken Hayate with her while she shops. All the shop owners know him, and he’s too well-behaved to cause any trouble for her. He stays sedately by her side, occasionally growling at men who stand a little too close for a little too long and letting children and the occasional teenager pet him. 

Riza picks a cluster of spinach off the shelf and frowns. It’s only March, so she can’t really expect anything better than some half-wilted leaves, but it still annoys her to no end. It’s one of the things she and Roy have in common; they both like fresh fruit and vegetables and both tend to avoid classic Amestrian fare, which is eight parts starch to one part protein to zero parts greens and comes in the incredible color spectrum of light brown to dark brown. Roy hates it because he is, as she once described while mildly inebriated, a city-raised twink who should have spent his life horrified by the university freshman he would have been teaching. Riza has no such excuse. It’s likely that she’s just spent too long with Roy and all the years she spent toughening her stomach against any sort of heavy fare have been completely ruined by the fact that she started ordering deeply complicated salads once she’d spent one lunch too long forcing down mess hall food while he very delicately ate orange-and-fennel-salad-with-exactly-one-and-a-quarter-teaspoons-of-chopped-mint and eventually gave up and started imitating his lunch order. 

She takes a brief look at the collection of wilted vegetables along the sparsely-covered shelves, takes one more look at the spinach, and resigns herself to waiting at least another month before she can have fresh greens. Maybe she can use this spinach in lentil soup, or something. That might work. 

She continues along to the aisle with the selection of tea, which is most of the reason she routinely returns to this store. People in Amestris have no clue what good tea is— not that she’s one to talk, really, but Roy infected her with his snobbery a long time ago and now she’s morphed from a ‘dump a teabag in some boiling water and call it a day’ person to someone who regularly spends a good ten minutes asking the store owner about brewing times. 

When she turns the corner, she sees a long blond braid in front of the tea selection and frowns. The long blond braid in question turns and his expression quickly shifts into one of recognition. 

“Hey,” Edward Elric says with far too little fear in his eyes for her liking. 

“Hello,” Riza replies coolly, “you’re standing in front of the tea.” 

“Oh,” Elric jumps out of the way immediately, a tin of lapsang souchong in hand. “Sorry.” 

“Hm,” she acknowledges, going to look at the rose blends. 

“So, uh, how are you?” He asks. 

She turns her head to the side, and raises an eyebrow at the question. 

It’s not that she necessarily dislikes Elric— he doesn’t seem to be an idiot, from what she can see, nor does he seem to be cruel, and both of those count for quite a lot with her— but she certainly does not like him. He is, from what she’s seen, alternately devastatingly awkward or unconsciously charming, often brash, always clever, and in possession of the self-preservation skills of a drunk fifteen-year-old. He is, in short, the sort of person she tries very hard to avoid out of the knowledge that there will always be a greater than non-zero chance that he will show up at her door at three am, bleeding from the chest with a duffel bag of cocaine in tow. Riza Hawkeye likes her weekend routine, she likes her dog, and she likes dislocating the wrists of men who try to touch her ass. She does not like chaos, and Edward Elric is chaos barely restrained. 

“Fine,” she says, and declines to ask him the same. 

He frowns. 

As a rule, she is perfectly fine with chaos running rampant through the streets so long as it’s well aware that the second it sets foot onto her front walk it will be filled with enough bullets to stock a small armory. Elric’s failing is that he doesn’t seem to be entirely aware that she always has at least two firearms on her, nor that her front walk is off-limits for him. He barely even seems aware that he brings chaos wherever he goes. Which, Riza reflects, is exactly why Roy likes him. 

Riza has known Roy since he was sixteen. She has seen him make mistake upon mistake on every scale imaginable, from drinking six cheap beers and vomiting on the rug to participating in state-sanctioned genocide. She knows him better than he knows himself, which is why she also knows that Roy likes to think of himself as a fellow eschewer of chaos, at least until the chaos arrives, at which point he— through no small amount of self-delusion— thinks ‘I can control this’ and invites it in for a fuck. The fact that he’s been able to live this long without acknowledging that basic fact about himself is a testament to the amount of cognitive dissonance he’s able to maintain on a daily basis. 

Riza is personally of the opinion that he probably shouldn’t have made it to adulthood. Unfortunately, now that he has, it’s her job to keep him and his alive and unharmed— a job that Edward Elric is making, well, not harder, but more time-consuming, just by virtue of the fact that there have now been two separate attempts to kidnap him in order to blackmail Roy into either caving and submitting to their demands, or demonstrating to the public that he is actually an unredeemable monster who is willing to let people kill his lover for the sake of politics. 

Roy’s apparent dive off the deep end hasn’t helped Elric’s standing with her either. 

Roy, as a rule, does not trust people. It’s one of his better qualities. It’s actually one of the only reasons he’s survived this long, as it acts as a sort of antidote to his utter insanity. Roy fucking Elric, she could deal with. Roy dating Elric? Manageable, if a little exasperating. Roy trusting Elric with the secret of his Aunt? Deeply disturbing. The only reason she hasn’t outright told him to end it is because the relationship isn’t putting Roy in any physical danger and it’s Maes’ job to deal with the political implications of whatever shit Roy pulls. She’s just there for security. 

“Look,” Elric says, “I get that you don’t like me— which is, fine or whatever— but you don’t have to rub it in. I’m not gonna start thinking that you approve of me if you ask how I’m doing.” 

Riza feels her mouth tighten nearly imperceptibly, but his point is a fair one, and so long as he’s not going to take small talk as encouragement, she may as well. 

“How are you?” She asks, tone entirely neutral. 

“Fine,” Elric says, and that’s the end of that. 

To her deep displeasure, he continues to stand next to her, apparently reading the tins with the sort of intense focus she associates with Havoc and pencil darts. She briefly contemplates the relative merits of standing near him— she knows, intellectually, that whatever chaos magnetism he has isn’t infectious, but she also doesn’t like to think about the steadily increasing likelihood that something decidedly un-routine is going to happen the longer she stands next to him— and decides to cede to her baser instincts to just grab the nearest tin of green and leave in the hopes that she won’t have to think about him for the rest of her weekend. 

She probably should have expected that it wouldn’t go to plan. 

She checks out, makes about forty-five seconds of small talk with the Bryce, the middle-aged owner of the store, carefully checks over her bags to make sure that the eggs aren’t crushing anything or being crushed, and leaves, hands full and with Hayate trotting along behind her sedately. 

Which is, of course, when someone grabs her purse and runs. 

Elric, who has followed her out, says, “Shit.” 

Riza is forced to agree with his assessment. There’s not much in her purse even worth having, but the only thing worse than Amestris’ native food is its DMVs, and Riza doesn’t fancy spending her Sunday waiting in a cramped room for a middle aged woman who went into the wrong line of work to glare at her for three minutes straight while she requests a new license. 

Riza sighs deeply, drops Hayate’s leash and her groceries and takes off running after them. 

Riza does cardio three times a week, averages six and a half minutes on her mile time, and always wears sensible shoes. By all rights, she should be able to catch a purse-snatcher easily. By all rights, the sidewalk shouldn’t be this crowded. By all rights, she shouldn’t have to vault over a fruit stand to keep up. 

But, because standing around Elric is apparently an occupational hazard, she isn’t able to catch them easily, the sidewalk is crowded, and she does have to vault over a fruit stand. 

Riza darts briefly into the road to avoid a baby carriage, jumps onto and over a bench to avoid some shrubbery, and vaults over the aforementioned fruit stand, attempting to herd the purse-snatcher away from somewhere less peopled so she can pull out a gun without drawing (even more) attention. 

The purse snatcher is kind enough to acquiesce to her unspoken demand, and eventually turns down a residential avenue, somewhere with a few scraggly bushes and a series of new and ugly apartment buildings. 

Riza looks around for passers-by, breathes a sigh of relief when she doesn’t see anybody, and pulls out the gun she keeps strapped to her thigh. 

“I’d advise,” she calls, barely out of breath, “that you stop running.” 

The purse-snatcher chances a look behind them, sees her gun, and freezes. 

Riza breathes a sigh of relief, tucks an errant strand of hair behind her ear, and approaches the man— young, maybe early twenties, with a patchy beard, gaunt look, and jittery fingers. She tucks the gun away. 

She holds out a hand. “My purse.” 

The man gives it back to her with the look of a frightened rabbit. 

“Hm,” she says, looking him up and down. “Why did you grab mine?” 

“Uh, you were there?” The guy shrugs awkwardly. 

Riza raises an eyebrow. “Do you want a rehab program?” 

The man blinks. “What?” 

“A rehab program.” Riza sighs. “Would you like a reference? It’s free.” 

“Oh, uh—” 

Riza frowns, pulling out a notecard and writing down an address. “Here.” She hands it to him. “Take a look if you’d like.” 

The man blinks, taking the card slowly. 

“Well,” Riza says. “I think you’d best be running along.” 

The man nods, and slowly backs away. Riza holds back a snort. She’s not going shoot him. If she’d wanted to, she’d have done so already. 

“Oh sweet,” says a familiar voice from behind her, and Riza does her best not to sigh in exasperation. 

She turns around to see Elric, groceries in both hands with Hayate’s leash wrapped around his wrist. 

“If you’ve come to retrieve my purse, I’m afraid you’re a bit too late.” 

Elric blinks. “What? No. You had it handled.” 

Riza is surprised despite herself. Elric, to her eye, seems like the sort of man who offers to gallantly beat someone up for you even if you’d rather he didn’t, and even if you did, could do it yourself. “You weren’t going to try to save it for me?” 

“Uh,” Elric says, looking at her like she’s said something so deeply stupid he’s not sure how to break it to her that she needs remedial lessons, “why would I? You didn’t want me to, right?” 

“No,” Riz says slowly, “I didn’t.” 

Elric shrugs. “Then why would I try? I’m not going to get in the way of people who don’t want or need my help.” 

“Hm,” Riza says. “Alright. Thank you for bringing me my groceries.” Hayate yips. “And Hayate.” 

Elric looks surprised. “No problem?” 

Riza winces internally. She hadn’t been that rude, had she? He couldn’t possibly have thought she wouldn’t thank him for saving her the trip back. 

“Look,” Elric says, “I get that you don’t like me, but could you at least tell me why.” 

Riza considers it. “The Major General is an idiot.” 

Elric blinks. “Uh, sure?” 

“No,” Riza said, slightly amused, “you’re making him an idiot.” Which is, come to think of it, not an entirely fair thing to say to him. Roy is, after all, capable of making his own extremely stupid decisions, even if Elric is encouraging him. 

Elric frowns, a flash of intelligence going through his odd eyes. “I’m a liability.” 

“A major one,” Riza agrees. 

Elric considers it for a moment more, then shrugs. “That’s fair. Anything I can do about it?” 

“I’m assuming you’re not including breaking up with him in your offer.” 

“No,” Elric says, giving her the same ‘are-you-stupid-or-am-I-really-stupid' look he’d given her earlier, “I’m not.” 

“He could do something stupid for you,” Riza says. “He already has, actually.” 

“What thing?” 

Riza raises an eyebrow. If he’s lost count, then the situation is worse than expected. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about.” She sighs. “His aunt.” 

“Oh.” Elric makes a face. “Yeah, I guess I can see how that’s not his smartest move.” 

“No,” Riza mutters, deeply amused at his assessment. 

“I’m not going to use it against him,” Elric says. 

“He doesn’t have any proof of that,” Riza counters. “Nor do I. I don’t like that.” 

“He has contingencies in place,” Elric retorts. “Well, I’m assuming. He’s a contingency sort of person.” 

“Yes,” Riza says dryly, “he is. But he’s also not usually a throw-caution-to-the-wind-and-start-spouting-off-secrets-to-his-new-boyfriend sort of person either.” 

Elric sucks in air through his teeth. “Yeesh.” 

Riza inclines her head in agreement. 

“I mean,” Elric says, “his aunt was a test. I doubt he’s going to tell me anything else anytime soon.” 

“We can only hope.” 

Elric shrugs. “Sorry for making your life more difficult.” 

“No,” Riza says archly, “you’re not.” 

Elric grimaces. “Okay, that’s fair. Uh—” 

Riza sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Please try to live up to his hopes.” 

“What,” Elric says, “like don’t get kidnapped or try to kidnap him or go to the tabloids or something?” 

“Or something.” 

“Alright,” Elric says, “I think I can do that.” 

“And,” Riza adds, taking her groceries and Hayate’s leash from him, “if you break up with him, try to do it on a Thursday. He’ll spend all weekend moping if it’s Friday and he’ll be nightmare come Monday, but I’ll murder him if I have to see him mope for more than a day.” 

“...Sure.” 

Riza wraps Hayate’s leash around her wrist and moves to leave, then thinks the better of it and turns around. 

“And stay off my front walk.” 

“What?” 

Riza doesn’t answer, merely hoisting her groceries a little more snugly into her arms and trying to remember if she has enough lentils for soup. (She does.)

**Author's Note:**

> This piece came into existence bc I realized I had left FAR too much of Roy's motivations to subtext, and so instead of going back and adding scenes from his point of view I decided to provide exposition through Riza roasting him, which had the added benefit of being Highly Enjoyable for me.
> 
> As always, kudos are much welcomed, comments are deeply appreciated (even if I don't always respond, I read them all and screenshot a few for rainy days). <3


End file.
